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Do Most Mississippi Republicans Think Obama Is a Muslim?

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Do Most Mississippi Republicans Think Obama Is a Muslim?

By Andrew Rosenthal March 13, 2012 10:41 amMarch 13, 2012 10:41 am

There is not a shred of truth to the rumor that President Obama is not really an American citizen, or that he’s secretly a Muslim. And yet the stories won’t die, because people keep repeating them and unscrupulous politicians are happy to capitalize on them.

Those who want to fan the flames sometimes try the grudging acceptance trick. It goes like this: “Well, if Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, then I have to take him at his word.” Rick Santorum pulled that one last month. After questioning Mr. Obama’s Christianity, he said: “I wasn’t suggesting the President’s not a Christian. I accept the fact that the president’s a Christian.” How very generous of him.
And yet, I was a bit surprised to see a PPP poll showing that 45 percent of Alabama Republicans think Mr. Obama is a Muslim, and only 14 percent know that he’s actually a Christian. In Mississippi, the same poll showed that a majority of Republicans, 52 percent, believe the Muslim lie.

While there’s no question that far too many people buy into this propaganda, I’m not ready to condemn a majority of Mississippians based on this survey. PPP is a partisan organization that conducts automated surveys. That means it’s not clear who answered the questions and whether the sample is statistically representative.

Current law prohibits automated dialers from calling cellphones. So PPP is likely missing a big chunk of the population. (The latest research shows that about 25 percent to 31 percent of people now use cellphones exclusively.)

My point is that not all survey organizations are created equal, and it’s worth keeping that in mind when you come across polling data in news articles.

When The Times conducts surveys (with our partner CBS), we always rely on live interviews (on both cellphones and landlines), and accepted probability standards. Our polls may not be perfectly predictive–no poll really is, at least not all the time–but at least you know they’re based on science, not robocalling. Here’s a document that explains our methodology in detail.

Even well-executed polls sometimes contain bad data. In the early 1990s, when I was covering the George H.W. Bush White House, we conducted a survey that included a question about Mr. Bush’s Lithuania policy. A solid majority said they supported it. Then we asked this question: If Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev cuts off the oil supply to Lithuania, should the United States impose sanctions on Moscow? The same majority said no. The threat of sanctions, of course, was Mr. Bush’s policy.

So we called a bunch of poll respondents back and asked them a simple question: “Where is Lithuania?” None of them knew. We tossed out the question.